Over at Huffington Post, Timothy Karr claims that “One attendee — a member of the Darwin-challenged Discovery Institute — sought to argue that the Internet be completely free of regulation” during the question and answers following Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt’s address to the Progress & Freedom Foundation’s Aspen Summit. That would be me. Actually, I make no such argument. There is a place for antitrust enforcement (provided it aims to protect competition, not competitors) and consumer protection. I draw the line at economic regulation, or competition policy, which tries to ensure that everyone who can afford to hire a lobbyist profits and no one who can afford to hire a lobbyist fails in the marketplace.
http://www.youtube.com/v/_9uy1o6-azI
Continue reading →
WARNING: The PFF Aspen Summitt served to both educate and inspire me, so expect a flurry of blog posts over the next few days.
While reviewing my notes during my 24 hour trek back to DC (most of which involved sitting in the Denver airport) I realized that Eric Schmidt said a lot of interesting things despite my intitial impression that his speech was rather devoid of content. Unfortunately for Dr. Schmidt, most of my conclusions are rather critical.
During the middle of his remarks, Schmidt pointed out that our web-powered world changes conventional thinking about business models and industry integration. In the past, Schmidt observed, vertical integration–buying up assets like, mines, railroads, and mills–cut costs by allowing one company to take a good from raw material to finished consumer good, without the transaction costs of swapping ownership throughout the process.
Continue reading →
A great Hayek quote from Law, Legislation, and Liberty:
The understanding that “good fences make good neighbours”, that is, that men can use their own knowledge in the pursuit of their own ends without colliding with each other only if clear boundaries can be drawn between their respective domains of free action, is the basis on which all known civilisation has grown. Property, in the wide sense in which it is used to include not only material things, but (as John Locke defined it) the “life, liberty and estates” of every individual, is the only solution men have yet discovered to the problem of reconciling individual freedom with the absence of conflict. Law, liberty, and property are an inseparable trinity. There can be no law in the sense of universal rules of conduct which does not determine boundaries of the domains of freedom by laying down rules that enable each to ascertain where he is free to act. (Hayek 1973, 1:107)
Property rights are essential to a free society. But “property rights” without clear boundaries aren’t property rights at all, they’re an affront to the rule of law.
One of the things I love about the geek community is that they’re absolutely fanatical about civil liberties. Take my new story at Ars about Mike McConnell’s ham-fisted demagoguery:
McConnell charged that as a result of press reports and Congressional debates regarding surveillance activities, “some Americans are going to die.” That’s because disclosures about surveillance activities will tip off terrorists to the existence of American surveillance programs and prompt them to use alternate communication methods, making it more difficult for the authorities to stop terrorist attacks before they occur.
This annoyed me enough that I took the liberty of editorializing in the very next paragraph:
McConnell didn’t elaborate on which specific revelations undermined anti-terrorism efforts. It can hardly have been a surprise to Al Qaeda that the U.S. government was spying on them or that they were using American voice and data networks to do it. Still, fear of terrorism is a potent force in American politics, and so McConnell’s charges, however dubious, may persuade some members of Congress to support the administration’s position.
But Ars readers, who were almost unanimous in their reactions, had a had some much better retorts. This one is my favorite:
Thousands of Americans already did die to secure us in our persons, houses, papers and effects. McConnell is pissing on their graves.
If only the general public had that kind of moral clarity! I think I’ve linked to this before, but Paul Graham’s essay on hackers offers a theory about why geeks get so excited about civil liberties issues.
Tim Wu announces AltLaw, a search engine for legal decisions. This is a fantastic idea. I wonder why Google hasn’t jumped on it yet. The case coverage is still somewhat limited—Supreme Court decisions only go back to 1991—but it’s an excellent start, and I imagine they’ll be adding additional cases over time.
In the Q&A after his speech Tuesday night at PFF’s Aspen Summit, one of the questions with which Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt was clearly most voluble and at ease dealt with the market for advertising. He rightly touted how Google has paid out billions of dollars to small and medium-size businesses, users of Google’s AdSense program. (Full disclosure: A project of mine, WashingtonWatch.com, is one.) And, without giving away the Google playbook, he discussed some of the directions Google’s advertising efforts will be going.
Along with newspaper advertising, he spent a good deal of time discussing location-based advertising. He enthused about the possibility of all those mobile computers people carry (still often called “phones”) helping people find the things they need as they move from place to place.
For example, Schmidt talked about how he could be driving down the street and get directions for all the places to eat in a given area. Because he had eaten pizza the night before, his phone might direct him to a burger joint. And then, Schmidt hastily added, he would turn off his phone.
Continue reading →
How does market growth affect the efficiency of copyright? I earlier argued that, holding all else equal, the low marginal cost of reproducing expressive works ensures that a larger audience will tend to reward copyright owners with larger profits. Population increases thus threaten to throw copyright policy out of balance, making the costs of its restrictions outweigh the benefits of its incentives. I’d here like to air a related but distinctly different argument: Holding all else equal, an increase in population, because it brings an increase in the number of authors motivated by non-pecuniary incentives, tends to render copyright less necessary.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.